The Aging of Aquarius

We all want to leave something behind.

We desperately want to have mattered.

We want to believe that our lives were not coincidental and that somebody beyond a few years after our death might be grateful that we passed this way.

Most of us can, of course, leave footprints in the sands of time just by leading good lives and enriching those who love us. But it would be nice to be remembered for something material, too.

Some of us try to leave our marks by stringing words together and/or by creating beautiful, memorable music. We write, we paint, we dream and hope.

Greatness is not defined by talent or the volume of one’s efforts, nor by the the number of people who remember our names when we’re gone. Statesmen and artists leave indelible impressions of their work but nearly nothing of their personal selves.

Please meet my friend, Cheri Fuller.

Cheri is a passionate 60-ish wife, mother, grandma, friend and artist. The world is full of Cheris, of course. But this one is ours and she’s as uniquely gifted and personally delightful as nearly everybody whose name you’ll never learn nor remember, except for one thing:

Cheri paints Eyerocks and leaves them scattered about in the spirit of Johnny Appleseed.

If you occasionally wander the rivers, streams and the ocean beaches of Northern California, if you’re really lucky, you may stumble upon an original Eyerock by Cheri. They are individually simple and yet magnificently striking works of art found lying about, here and there.

Eyerocks by Cheri are nothing more than a human endorsement of the fragile beauty of nature and a statement, that we humans are also part of Mother Nature’s landscape.

We belong here and we matter in the grand scheme of things.

If you find one, turn it over carefully so as not to disrupt its canvas. You’ll see this signature.

Take a picture. Take two or three.  You’ve discovered a treasure that is, as far as I can figure, a unique gift to the world.

But, please put it back where and how you found it.

I slept until almost 7 a.m. this morning.

That’s two hours later than usual. When I do that my body feels a bit lighter and less achy but it takes awhile for my brain to engage. I feel a little foggy-headed. But I’ve done this long enough to proceed with my early morning routine on cruise control.

I took the dogs outside and waited for them to finish their morning ablutions. Upon my return, my 8-year-old grandson presented me with my morning mental calisthenics:

“Grandpa, do you have a crane?”

My brain does a quick search through my mental file cabinet:

“Crane” – noun:

1. any large wading bird of the family Gruidae, characterized by long legs, bill, and neck and an elevated hind toe.

2. a device for lifting and moving heavy weights in suspension.

I know the word, don’t understand the question.

“A what?” I ask, blowing out the cobwebs as quickly as I can.

“A crane,” he repeats patiently, “You know, to hold up your leg.”

I know Isaiah very well and I know that when this conversation ends I will be slapping my face with Oliver Hardy-like consternation.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I tell him, perfect straight man that I am.

“You know,” he explains again patiently, but with a growing sense of exasperation, “A crane to lean on so you don’t have to put your weight down on your leg.”

BOING!!

“You mean a CANE??” I ask, like the idiot I clearly am.

“YES!” he says, the exasperation arriving. “My leg hurts.”

May God forgive me, I pulled rank on him. “Your leg is fine, go get ready for school!”

It never ends.

Copyright © 2011, Dave Williams. All rights reserved.

I’m watching our girls as they sleep off their stress.

I picked them up an hour ago from the groomer. They cried when I left them and they cried even louder when I returned.

They were thrilled that I had come back for them.

Home again, I let them out of their carriers and they smothered me with frantic, tail-wagging kisses even though I’m the guy who had left them in cages with a stranger.

Cricket and me.

I really don’t think they even remember that. I   can’t know for sure, of course.

These girls need Carolann and me for their very   existence. We know that, but they don’t. They   don’t think about how they would find food or   warmth or safety if Carolann and I weren’t   around.

They just snuggle between us in bed.

They lick us their good-night kisses and go   straight into a deep stress-free sleep, believing that they are in Heaven. It’s enough for them. It’s everything.

I think God gives us dogs to tell us how completely, selflessly and unconditionally He loves us.

Copyright © 2011 by David L. Williams all rights reserved

I have never understood why people make a big deal out of the arrival of a new year.

It’s not a grumpy old fart thing. I’ve just never seen the significance of celebrating the arrival of another new day. It happens every 24 hours. But once each year it happens and people go crazy drinking and hugging and kissing each other and often total strangers. I have nothing against drinking or hugging and kissing. It’s the occasion that stumps me.

Some people suggest New Year’s Eve is just an excuse for a party.

Maybe, but I think there’s something deeper going on here, something meaningful. Mortality, perhaps? I want to understand, to “get it.” So, today I began looking into the holiday and I started by researching the song that defines the event and the spirit:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

 For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup o’kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

 

That’s the first of several verses and choruses of the original poem written by Robert Burns in 1788. Literally translated, the Scottish “auld lang syne” means “old long since,” but in context, “For auld lang syne” is loosely translated to mean, “for the sake of old times.”

 

The little light bulb has just gone on over my cartoon head!

 

New Year’s Eve isn’t really about the arrival of a new year, it’s about the passing of the old year! 

 

(Oh, puh-leeze, cut me a little slack. I’m often late to arrive at an obvious conclusion. Especially when people say the opposite of what they mean!) 

 

It’s not about the arriving future, it’s about the departing past? Well, Hell’s bells, then why don’t we make it about that and have an evening of nostalgia and reminiscence? Why don’t we just haul out photo albums and tell each other great stories from our personal pasts? Why all the expense, the travel, the fancy meals and too much booze? Why do we insist on making New Year’s Eve a big deal?

Maybe they’re right. Maybe it really is just an excuse for a party and kissing total strangers.

Still, in the words of Robert Burns:

 We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.

How can you argue with that?

As I type these words I am awaiting a knock at the door from the repo man.

He’s coming to get my beloved motor home. Unemployed for four months now, I must let her go. (I say “her” because men always give cars, boats and RVs women’s names. We love them, ya know? We really, really do. But at this point I’m glad I never named her.)

It’s just a thing. Just stuff.

Frankly, I’ll be glad to have it out of the driveway where it was a constant, nagging reminder of my income shortage.

Carolann and I had a couple of years of great comfort, relaxation and good times in and around our motor home.

The repo man can’t take away the good times.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I believe that. So, today I’m going to spare you  959 words.

Our five-year-old grandson is learning to spell. Doing exceptionally well, too. Right up to that last letter.

(This is an annual re-publication of my holiday warning I issue to friends and strangers alike every year at this time. Please take heed. Stay off the roof!)

December 8th is an anniversary for me. This time it will mark twenty years since the day I fell off the roof of our house while putting up Christmas lights.

I only fell eight or ten feet and I managed my fall. Knowing that I couldn’t prevent it I intentionally jumped and hit the ground with a tuck and roll strategy to minimize the damage. I shattered nearly every bone in both heels and ankles. After five hours of reconstructive surgery I spent a week in a hospital. I was in a wheelchair for the next three months while receiving painful physical therapy three times a week. And now, nineteen years later, I still walk with a noticeable limp and am in constant pain. If I spend a full day on my feet for some special occasion — a family outing at Disneyland, for example — the pain can be so excruciating I can’t sleep. On my best days it’s just a constant, nagging reminder of one really bad decision I made a couple of decades ago.

And I’m the lucky one. 

I could have easily broken my neck or back and been in that wheelchair for life, paralyzed from the waist down. I could have died. People do, even from a fall of just eight feet. The doctors at the ER told me ‘tis the season. They get many such cases every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there is one thing all of us have in common: We’re all, every one of us, smarter than the fools who will take a tumble.

Absolutely none of us think we might fall off the roof when we go up there.

I know you. You don’t think so, either. You’ll be more careful than I was. “Thanks for the heads up!” you’re thinking. That was my attitude, too.

That morning, December 8, 1990, Carolann phoned me from a friend’s house to say she saw a sign in our neighborhood for a guy who would put up Christmas lights for $20 but I said, “Oh, no. It’s my job. I’m the dad!” It cost me thirty THOUSAND dollars and a lifetime of constant pain to put the lights up that year.

And there are the dreams.

You have occasional dreams of being able to fly? I have frequent dreams of being able to run again, to run like the wind in a baseball outfield as I did when I was young or just to chase after my grandsons at my current age. I can’t do that. I have to call after them and hope they run back to me.

All for the sake of Christmas lights.

I met my wife when we were teammates on a competition dance team. I haven’t been able to dance with her for nineteen years now. Oh, we can slow dance but we can’t do the show-off stuff, the fun spins and fancy twirls that brought us together in the first place.

Thanks to those damned Christmas lights.

Frankly, I get tired of telling this story so I’m not putting much effort into it.

Some of you have no plans to go on the roof so it doesn’t matter. The rest of you are going up on the roof no matter what I say.

Personally, I’m not going to fall off anything higher than a bed or a barstool from here on out. You all do what you like.

You’ve been warned.

Merry Christmas! (It’s a lot more fun without oxycodone.)

This weekend is the end of Daylight Saving Time. 

Please note, it’s “saving,” not “savings” with an “s” on the end. You can’t put daylight or time in a bank to be withdrawn and spent in the future. That would be very cool but it doesn’t work that way. Time doesn’t care who you are, what you do, what you think or how you use the finite number of breaths and heartbeats given to you on this earth. When you’re finished, that’s it. Doesn’t matter what the clock is reading.

Time just marches on, as they say.

Still, it’s amazing how many intelligent and otherwise reasonable people seem to think that when we turn the clocks back one hour late Saturday night or early Sunday morning that they will actually, magically GAIN an honest-to-God hour in their lives.”Yay!” they say, “I get to sleep an extra hour!”

Patiently, I try to explain, “Uh, no. Not really. You’ll sleep the same number of hours but the time will be different, that’s all.”

For some reason the fact that they turned the clock back one hour when they went to bed has totally slipped or befuddled their minds.

“No, when I wake up at ten tomorrow morning it will really be eleven!”

And that’s where logic has somehow jumped the rails and turned over in a ditch.

“It will really be eleven.”

My late, beloved Grandma Webster used to put us through our paces on this when we were just kids. For days, maybe weeks after a time change she would say, “It’s really nine o’clock. Time for you kids to get in bed!”

“No, Grandma, it really is EIGHT o’clock!” we’d explain,  “Look, it says so right on the clock!”

She was undaunted because we were just dumb kids and she was in charge. And, so, we’d have to go to bed an hour early because the world had recently switched to Standard Time. Nevertheless, six months later we’d go through the same routine with her in the opposite direction.

“Why are you kids up so early? It’s really only six in the morning.”

“Grandma, no. It’s SEVEN! See? The clock says so!”

After awhile she’d get her circadian clock in tune with the one on the stove. But it was a struggle to get her there.

And six months later, we’d do it all over again.

Saturdays are Grandpa and Isaiah days.

Carolann works. Isaiah’s dad works. So, it’s just the eight-year-old and me.

This past Saturday I was preparing to fix us lunch when Isaiah marched into the kitchen and proudly proclaimed, “I AM CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!” I didn’t turn around to look at him right away because this is the sort of goofy thing I’ve come to expect of young boys, having been one myself and having several of my own. It was the sort of announcement that would have evoked a shake of the head and a single word from my dad:

“Knucklehead.”

My grandpa called me “Knothead.” Same thing, I guess.

Capt. Isaiah Underpants

When he persisted, “Grandpa, look!” I turned and found myself facing Captain-Honest-To-God-Underpants in the flesh. At that point I think I actually did call him a knucklehead. I laughed and that was apparently all he wanted. Pleased with himself, Fruit-of-the-Looms perched firmly on his large, round cranium, he took off to save the world. Or, the TV room, at least.

I marvel at childish imaginations. I would give anything to have mine back.

When I was a kid in the fifties we had cowboy TV heroes like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger and Sky King, among others. We all had our own cowboy outfits and toy cap guns. We did not ride stick horses made from a single fence picket. That sort of thing was for babies. We merely slapped our thighs in a hoofbeat rhythm as we ran through the fields and neighborhood flower beds. We lived in a perpetual cloud of dust.

Back then I made a name for myself in the Wild West of North Sacramento as “Dapper Dave!” I don’t think I ever mentioned it to anybody, it was my secret. I think even then I had an instinctive understanding of how stupid it sounded. But you have to give me credit for using the word “dapper” before turning ten and for appreciating the cheesy charms of alliteration.

Denny, Mike, Danny

Dapper Dave rode the range, battling bandits and rescuing lovely ladies with the help of  his sidekicks, Denny, Danny and Mike. These are my uncles, my mother’s younger brothers, only slightly older than me. If they had their own cowboy monikers they kept them secrets, too.

Now, here I am half a century later, rinsing dishes and looking squarely into the britches of Captain Underpants and trying to figure out how we got from cowboys to this.

Don’t get me started on Spongebob Squarepants, which is obviously where this lunacy began.

Only today have I learned that there actually is a Captain Underpants character! Isaiah did not invent him.

Captain Underpants is a super hero in a series of children’s books with such

titles as Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of Professor Poopy Pants and Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy (Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets). These books are being sold at Isaiah’s school fundraiser. Mind you, this is the same school that will send a kid to the principal’s office for calling a classmate a “butthead.”

I wonder who makes the call when a kid is referred to as a “Nasty Nostril Nugget”?

Look, I take pride in being open-minded and young at heart but I confess that when I first heard of these books I was a bit shocked and annoyed. Suddenly, Spongebob seemed as old-school and boring as Popeye. But, after thinking about it a bit I understand that the writers, cartoonists and publisher of these books are merely appealing to kids at their own level of developing sense of humor. And while part of me fears this will boost our progeny into more advanced levels of outrageous humor involving obscenities and pornographic themes at an even earlier age, the truth is, what I think doesn’t matter any more. No, really, it doesn’t. And that’s a profound relief.

My work here is done.

While I assist in the care of my grandsons they are not mine to raise except when their own parents ask for help or drop the ball. Then I get involved because technically, I am merely continuing the raising of my own sons.

It’s a wonderful release to no longer feel personally responsible for the plight of society and the direction it is headed. I’m an oldster now, paddling alongside those younger adults frolicking and jockeying for position in the mainstream of ever-changing modern culture. Our kids are now making the tough calls and the big decisions. They’re the ones guiding the development and/or decay of the society.

Not my job, not any longer.

Just as Dapper Dave is nothing more now than an old, fond memory, so shall be my little Captain Underpants in the not-too-distant future. I suspect he’ll be just fine for it. I’m not going to sweat the small stuff. But I’ll tell you one thing:

The first time Captain Underpants refers to his five-year-old cousin, my youngest grandson, as “Bionic Booger Boy” we’re going to have a little talk.

© David L. Williams, 2010

® Captain Underpants is a registered trademark of Scholastic Books. (That’s funny too, huh?)